This seems like good advice on learning tones:

http://thepolyglotdream.com/2011/11/19/tips-on-how-to-learn-chinese-tones/

Thanks for the link! It's always helpful to read and hear the advice and experiences, to sharpen the mind again on how to learn a language effectively (instead of mindlessly adding some words to Skritter). My tools from now on: adding conversations and example sentences from nciku.com into Anki and the words into Skritter, speaking sentences and finding suitable listening and reading material, which can be hard. And the tones will perfect themselves when focusing on speaking sentences. I wish I had the thirst for learning languages like this guy, sigh! But things can change once you reach a certain level..:)

Read his profile, absolutely stunning, 10 languages and soon to be 12! He can even speak Dutch, that's how nuts he is!;-)

My tones are far from perfect, but I've never considered them a hurdle. To me distinguishing a sound with numerous inflections isn't difficult too difficult to hear. I've always had more trouble figuring out how to organize my sentence or when is a good time to drop a character in a two character verb or noun.

I've studied music most of my life (trumpet) and relate the sounds more to melodic lines. On the trumpet specifically I can hear them as I would bend a note. I'm curious to hear why others find them difficult or easy.

Am I the only one who is really intrigued by the sentence-based pronunciation tool he mentions in the article?

It sounds really interesting, but sadly he doesn't mention the name or where to get it.

Hearing the words as a native speaker uses them in a sentence really helps cements the tones in my mind. Even hearing the audio in Skritter when it is available for words helps me remember the tones. If I don't hear the word pronounced, if I only ever encounter the word while reading, then the pronunciation can often seem arbitrary.

I definitly think some people are born with or have developed more of an ear for music than others. I do find the tones somewhat difficult to pronounce and hear although I can make a good imitation. I didn't have musical training before I was adult and I would say my musical ability to hear music is about average and my sense of rythym is not the best either. It is better than it used to be since I learned violin. I would be curious to know if a musical ear and ability to pick out tones is related.

I've often been told that I pronounce Chinese very well, despite having been exposed to hardly any Chinese apart from that spoken by the teacher (which I intend to change from now onwards). I've been studying violin since the age of 5, piano since I was 12, had singing exams at high school, and recently passed my music theory exam, so I wouldn't be surprised if this were related. I've always viewed speaking Chinese as a sort of singing, because if you drew the tones on a piece of paper it would vaguely resemble a piece of music.

As for the writer of the polyglot blog, he must definitely have a lot of natural acoustic ability to be able to learn so many languages with a perfect accent.

inkubus, I thought the same thing. That's precisely the kind of tool that would help me quite a bit at the moment. Anyone have any suggestions?

From the screenshot he provides, I'd say the sentence-based pronunciation tool is part of Auralog's "Tell Me More" languages courses on CD-ROM.

Go ahead and ask Luca, he's very helpful. Let me know if you can't contact him via the blog.